The advent and explosion of the World Wide Web and the Internet have created a huge demand for data communications bandwidth. Once satisfied with a 56 Kb/s analog modem, many home users are now demanding broadband Internet connections capable of sustaining 1.5 Mb/s, or more. In order to satisfy this ever-increasing demand for bandwidth to the home and office, several competing standards for data communications have emerged. One of these standards is digital subscriber line (“DSL”) technology.
DSL is a high-speed connection that utilizes the same wires as a regular telephone line. DSL offers a number of advantages over other types of high-speed links to the home and office. For instance, because DSL utilizes a higher frequency for data communications than that used for voice communications, the same phone line may be used for both data and voice simultaneously. Moreover, several different types of DSL connections exist that can provide extremely high data rates without requiring new wiring. Therefore, DSL can operate on the existing phone line already present in most homes and businesses.
A typical DSL circuit comprises a standard telephone line connection at a customer premises which is wired to a DSL access multiplexer (“DSLAM”) located at a central office (“CO”) or a remote terminal (“RT”) serving the customer. The DSLAM is capable of communicating data over the customer telephone line. The standard telephone line connection at the customer premises is also wired to a voice switch connected to the Public Switched Telephone Network (“PSTN”) in the CO. The voice switch is capable of communicating voice over the customer telephone line. The wiring carrying the data signals from the DSLAM are tied into the wiring carrying the voice signals from the voice switch enabling the combined voice and data signals to travel over the same telephone line to the customer premises.
The wiring of DSL circuits suffer from a number of drawbacks, however, when there are pre-existing plain old telephone service (“POTS”) circuits between the CO and a customer premises. In conventional POTS circuits, standard voice phone calls degrade noticeably when the copper portion of a phone line is greater than 18,000 feet long. In order to restore call quality, load coils are inserted at specific intervals along a telephone line to boost the strength of the voice frequency range at the expense of higher frequencies. Typically, the coils are placed at 3000 foot intervals from either end, and at 6000 foot intervals along the phone line. However, in boosting the voice frequency range, load coils also act to block the higher frequencies utilized in the communication of DSL data signals. Thus, one drawback is that load coils must be located and removed in order to provision DSL circuits on the phone line. Another drawback is that when DSL circuits are removed, the load coils must be spliced back into the phone line to provide acceptable voice quality for customers greater than 18,000 feet from the CO. Yet another drawback is that the process of continually adding and removing load coils reduces the integrity in the phone line resulting in degraded voice and data communication. It is with respect to these considerations and others that the various illustrative embodiments of the present invention have been made.